CIA reports on Soviet ESP and cybernetic telepathy research

The file consists of three separate CIA information reports. The first, dated 15 May 1963, records a source's conversation with D.A. Kerimov, chairman of a department at Leningrad University and a deputy overseeing parts of the Soviet Union's cybernetics research effort. The second and third, dated 4 June and 3 August 1964, come from a different source and concern a Soviet graduate student named Alexander P. Molchanov, who spent time working in a US laboratory on hearing and cochlear modeling.

All three were released together in December 2021 in response to a Mandatory Declassification Review request filed in December 2019. The CIA classified them Confidential at the time of writing and released them with limited redactions under Executive Order 13526.

The source who met with Kerimov in Leningrad came away with a specific, on-the-record judgment: at no single point in the conversation, except for one story about transmitting piano-playing skill through nerve signals, did the source learn of a single Soviet cybernetics development in advance of the US state of the art. Kerimov described teaching machines, computer language design, and machine translation research in the USSR as roughly comparable to, or behind, Western work.

The one exception was specific. Kerimov described Soviet experiments in which electrodes placed on the forearm recorded the nerve signals of a skilled pianist while playing, and then played those same signals back into the arm of someone who could not play well. According to Kerimov, the second person was then able to play difficult music, and retained some of that ability afterward as ordinary learned skill. When the source pressed for detail or a publication, Kerimov could not provide either, and said he only knew of the work secondhand.

Kerimov also described a separate line of research at Leningrad under Professor L.L. Vasilyev, who Kerimov said had been working on extrasensory perception since 1927 without being taken seriously until recently. By 1963, Vasilyev had a research group whose task, according to Kerimov, was to determine what these thought waves actually were and then put them to practical use. Kerimov said some of what Vasilyev was studying involved not just guessing at events already occurring, but attempts at predicting future random events.

Kerimov, by the source's account, was a committed and unembarrassed believer. When asked how ESP could be reconciled with Marxist materialism, he did not treat the question as a trap, framing it instead as the open scientific problem Vasilyev was trying to solve. He mentioned having separately discussed ESP with Dr. E.M. Purcell, the Nobel laureate physicist, and said he understood similar work had been done in the West.

The second and third reports describe a different angle on the same subject, gathered a year later from a Soviet graduate student named Alexander Molchanov, who was working in a US laboratory on models of the cochlea, the part of the inner ear that processes sound. According to the source hosting him, Molchanov reported regularly on his own work, and one of these updates concerned an interest of his back in the USSR: attempts to detect radio energy generated by the human nervous system, either transmitted or sensed by test subjects in Soviet experiments.

Molchanov described the Soviet research as poorly defined, essentially a search for meaningful patterns inside multiple overlapping, low-amplitude radio frequency bands, with no clear underlying theory. He asked the source about statistical correlation methods that might help detect a real signal inside what otherwise looked like noise, describing the whole effort as a kind of last-resort approach to a badly defined problem.

The third report adds detail on the same subject: Molchanov linked the human radio research to Vasilyev's ESP program, noting that mathematicians E.M. Braverman and M.A. Aizerman had argued with Vasilyev over whether a rigorous theoretical model should be built before running further experiments, while Vasilyev, a physiologist by training, wanted to keep generating results and let theory follow. The source described Molchanov as a capable, mathematically trained applied physicist who held some private reservations about the ESP work but declined to criticize Vasilyev directly.

The reports establish that Soviet cybernetics officials and researchers, speaking candidly to American contacts in 1963 and 1964, described active, funded programs at Leningrad University studying both extrasensory perception and possible radio-frequency signals generated by the human nervous system, and that a senior Soviet cybernetics administrator personally believed in the research. They establish that the CIA source assessing Kerimov's Leningrad program judged it, on the whole, to be roughly on par with Western cybernetics work rather than ahead of it, with one unverified exception involving nerve-signal recording.

What the reports do not establish is whether any of this research produced results that Soviet scientists themselves considered valid, whether the programs continued or were shut down, or what became of Vasilyev's group after the mid-1960s. The reports are secondhand accounts of conversations, filtered through two different American sources, describing what Soviet scientists said about their own work rather than independently verified Soviet data.